Fifa World Cup

1st May

Back from Richards Bay for the long weekend and realising more and more that we really need to step up a notch to meet our “move aboard” deadline of December 2010.

The trip was a little strange as the purchase of the yacht is still in process, but we got to see what “rough seas” – rough enough to close the harbour to small craft – look like. We took a walk out on the pier while the waves were crashing over it and Kyle got a little more confidence after his initial panic, realising it is only water after all. We took a walk around the marina and acquainted ourselves with the yacht club, the boat yard and the other yachts, not to mention ours. We met some people, specifically our new neighbours and oriented ourselves about town.

Moving aboard is not casting off the mooring lines and leaving for our adventure, but rather a date to leave our home and change our lifestyle to full time live aboard yachties. We have a load of work to complete on the boat before we can leave, our list seems to get longer by the day, or at least everytime we are aboard. Our final departure date is still up in the air…

We have a set sum of money set aside for the original “makeover” of the yacht and then a monthly “maintenance and upgrade” budget. This means we need to be frugal about what we spend and where we spend it. We don’t want to have changed everything and realise we did not need to or worse that it was better how it was before the changes.

We are adding all our thoughts and ideas to our current upgrade list but will be making changes and reprioritising the work as time passes. The 5week school holiday (extended due to the FIFA World Cup) will be a great chance to decide on our priorities with regards to this, not to mention a great escape for the freezing temperatures of the highveld and finding the warm coastal weather fronts.

Stepping up a notch at home includes getting things sold. This seems to be harder than originally thought… We started off at full tilt and managed to sell a few items quickly, we have a few interested parties in some other items and are waiting for the payments before we hand over the goods. I will have to start applying some pressure to the buyers to ensure that if the deals fall through we will still have enough time to find another buyer before December. But the number of large furniture items we own is noticeably decreasing in line with our plans.

We also have a large pile of “jumble sale” items that is increasing everyday. I plan on setting up a table at the office and selling these items. Our office is in a large business park with well over 1000 people working on the premises everyday so it seems like a good idea (I will let you know once I have set it up in a few weeks time). In the mean time I am slowly working through all the items in our house deciding what must stay and what must go. This morning I reached into our bathroom cupboard to get a new bottle on conditioner and a tube of toothpaste and found a selection of hair appliances that I had forgotten I even owned. These include hairdryers, a hot brush and a curling tong among others. These are definite “hotsale” items at a jumble stall…add them to the pile. We have gone through our PC games and PSP games and added the ones we don’t play as well so our selection and variety is also improving.

On the food planning side…
We have tried a few tinned foods and quickly realised that we are way too spoilt and would never live on tinned food alone. It is far more likely to be a “snail starter” or “mussels or oysters with cheese crackers” as a treat. Tinned food lunches would include “Spaghetti on toast”, “pilchards on toast” or “tinned Viennas” as part of cold meats and salad. “Bullybeef (corned meat) on mashed potato” or “tuna” cooked with pasta makes a good supper and tinned fruit is always good as a desert. Tinned tomatoes and Tomato/Onion mixes will be used for most stews, casseroles and mince mixes. “Tinned peas (petit pous) and tinned Sweetcorn make great non-frozen vegetables on the side with mixed tinned vegetables working great for Curries. But it seems we will need to find a way to supplement our diet with other things…

Catching fish could help increase our menu variety, but this will happen on an ad hoc basis and as we are not big fish eaters this would probably be restricted to once a week at most.

Coming from Africa, non-meat meals are not part of our household or lifestyle. Barry has a saying “Meat is Meat and a man must eat”. If I place a meal in front of him with no meat he asks why I am serving him a bed of rice…. I told you we are spoilt. This seems to leave us with no alternative but to have a large working freezer on board to store frozen food in bulk, meat is relatively cheap here in Africa.
I will still be looking at other non-perishable foods (packet foods and box meals etc) before our final departure date, we will see how that pans out.

We are all looking forward to the holiday (boat working/day sailing holiday) in June where we will be alone on the boat and start actual work on her. I am off to set up the dates and schedule for the holiday, we need to come back for a week somewhere so that I can ensure my work stays up to date, we need to be down there for the scheduled yacht club ballot meeting to become official members and we need to arrange that both Amy and Keagan can spend some time with us down there, all the while keeping in mind that the country will be hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup during that time and foreign and local tourists will be everywhere, making the journey times and dates more important than normal. Go Bafana Bafana!

Ocean Comparisons

7th April

Lying in my bed last night it dawned on me that we have sailed in 2 oceans already. We did our day skipper in the warm Indian Ocean and our Coastal Skipper in the cold Atlantic ocean.

By reflecting and comparing the 2 trips I have a pretty good idea of the different oceans, taking my lack of knowledge and ability whilst in the Indian into account I can say the following for certain. The Atlantic was teaming with animal and bird life whilst the Indian had less animal activity. A comparative list reads as follows:

Indian Ocean:

Dolphins visit 1 occasion
Seagulls in the air most days
Whale spotted on 1 occasion.

Atlantic Ocean:

Seals visit daily, almost all the time seeming to race alongside.
Penguins spotted 1 occasion
Whales spotted 2 occasions
Jellyfish spotted in deeper water
Seagulls fill the air
Other bird life everywhere including Cormorants and ducks
The water in the Atlantic is very cold, making the boat hull cold to the touch and dark coloured decks easy to walk on (you normally need shoes it’s so cold). Wear a jacket and long pants whenever sailing and swimming is completely out of the question. The water of the Indian is warm, the hulls are hot and any dark coloured non-skid means burning feet on hot decks. A quick swim whilst anchored is welcome relief from the heat, a pair of shorts or a costume are the order of the day.

I realised from this trip that it is not the wave height that counts but rather the wavelength, comforting, as before leaving we checked the weather on windfinder and found 4.5 metre waves forecast. We compared this to other objects and realised the waves would be the height of our house! For a landlubber that seems pretty steep but once we were out there we managed just fine, gliding over the swells without a second thought. Being on a cat that also meant not heeling over.

I also discovered I suffer from seasickness! Barry said I literally turned green!
Boy oh boy, not the fun I had in mind, but the Sturgeron tablets I took worked like a charm. I will definitely be stocking up on those before we cast the lines off!

Sailing Course

4 April 2010

We got back from our “Coastal Skipper practical” late last night. I was sadly disappointed by the whole experience. I did however, take away the most important information I could have hoped to get…we can sail around the world with our current experience and be just fine, that we were correct in our decision to go on a catamaran and that we will have the time of our lives. Pack the bags, board the boat, see you on the water matey!


We went on this course hoping to gain some valuable catamaran sailing experience, unfortunately our trainer spent the 6 days trying to keep everything a secret, prove anything we thought incorrect (often placing us in dangerous situations) and spending more time sulking in the saloon than anything else.

Things we did not appreciate included words like “No, we won’t tack along the shore line because I am too lazy”. “It is too much work to do ….” And the ever so professional and training like statement of “Fine, learn the hard way, do whatever you want”.

I may not be a sailing instructor but running aground while at anchor, sailing wing on wing whilst you are on a broad reach and dropping all your anchor chain and rode even whilst anchoring in 1.7m of water (at high tide) within 3 metres of the shore shows more than a little inexperience…or was it that our particular instructor had a chip on his shoulder and did not like that we had already had sail training from a professional and competent sailing school sailing school and actually had some knowledge, perhaps a lot more than he had intended or was able to teach.


When we suggested anchoring in slightly deeper water, he went closer to the side. When we suggested the sails be set up differently he tied more lines in an attempt to keep then where he had them and when we tried to put out 3 – 5 times scope for the anchor he dropped the full rode. Every time trying to “be correct” or “prove us wrong”. Whatever he was trying to do it made the 6 days almost unbearable, especially since we were the only 2 “students”. He even told us we would capsize the catamaran in a mere 8 knots of wind if we sheeted the main in hard. Luckily for him my children were not on board as I would not have been able to hold my tongue when risking my children’s lives.

On the other hand I am glad to be home with my kids and preparations are back in full swing. We are down a month now standing at 8 months to full time live aboard. My list for the next week includes home schooling stationery sets, checking in on the boat haul out date, together with a doctor’s appointment to discuss the various vaccinations and prescriptions we will be needing.

Over the past year I have been making a list of all the medicines we have used, including a few we have not but might likely need, together with a little research on the internet as to the vaccinations requirements and suggestions for the many countries we will be visiting. Most vaccinations remain active for 10 years and have a period of a few days to a few weeks before becoming effective. Some require more than 1 dose at intervals of a few weeks and some can be administered together. We will discuss all of these with our doctor and let him advise the best course of action to take in terms of timing, possible side effects and effectiveness. Luckily both the boys recently had a measles vaccination due to an outbreak in the area and Kyle even went so far as to say “I love injections.” The statement “I laugh in the face of danger” comes to mind so we are good to go from that side.

We received a letter inviting Barry and I to a special assembly on the 16th of April for the Top 10 assembly for Rauen, he never fails to impress me with his dedication, diligence and effort. This kids deserves all he has coming. Well done boy! (Again)

It is also Kyle’s birthday this week so celebrations seem to be the order of the day, my youngest child is officially in double digits. Happy, Happy birthday boy, hope you love the gift and its perfect for the yacht too!

Why not live your dreams?

During the weekend I was researching (as usual) and came across a website where you can enter the top 10 things to do before you die. I took a peak at the Top 10 of all time and was rather surprised when “Sail around the world” came up at number 9!

So many people interested in sailing around the world, yet so few people doing it? What on earth could be the reason that so few people are doing it when so many dream of doing it? Do so few people really follow their dreams, their hearts, their reason for being?

Why? Why? Why?

The only conclusion I could come up with was that the average person out there does not believe they have enough money to do this….

Surprising, because most of my friends have more of that particular resource than me.
But most of my friends think they don’t have enough…

Perhaps the reason is really that they are scared to pack everything up, sell all they have, depart on a trip so outlandish and crazy they can not get past the idea of having it as a dream.

Perhaps it is not money at all that keeps us from achieving our dreams, whatever they are. But rather the lack of desire? If that is the case read no further...

Perhaps it is the fear of the unknown, the fear of change, the kids, the house, the life, our own society? Perhaps it is because we have been trained to own a nice house in a nice area, send our kids to a good school, work for the boss to earn a living and retire when we are old enough, with enough money to live the rest of our lives comfortably.

Perhaps we need to shift the perspective of society and change the way we all think. Life’s too short not to follow your dreams!

Go on everyone, take just one step today towards achieving your ultimate dream, take one step everyday towards it and you may be surprised to suddenly realise you can have your dreams and live them too!

Homeschooling decisions

13 March 2010

Rauen went on a leadership camp this weekend. It is also the same weekend as the open day at Ashton, the high school Keagan is currently at and that Amy matriculated from last year. This is the first real shock of our decision for me. That sounds a little crazy considering how soon we plan on leaving and the number of things we have done towards this goal but let me explain.


Up until this point, we have been making a move towards moving full time aboard, but none of the actions we have taken as yet have really affected the future should we change our minds.

• We have taken a skipper course and passed the licence but we could just use the skipper’s licence to sail on weekends and holidays.
• We have paid the deposit on the sailing yacht and will be paying the balance shortly, but we could use the yacht for weekends and holidays.
• We have started selling our furniture and belongings, but we could replace them if we decided to stay.
• Etc, etc, etc

The decision not to allow Rauen to write the entrance exam into high school and rather change to the home schooling system is much more final. It would be a lot more complicated to enrol him at a later stage, if we could even get him enrolled at a later stage. Continuing with home schooling while I am full time employed would be impossible and we would be unable to stay here unless I was full time employed.


The most difficult part of all of this is that I am still not completely sure how the home schooling system works, what level of teaching will be required and how much is expected from the parent with regards to the education and a million more questions that flit though my mind every second. I have ordered a DVD explaining all of these questions and more and will only receive it next week so my nerves are finished at the moment. Critical timing as the entrance exam is on Monday and I will only receive the DVD on Wednesday. But we are leaving in December so all of this is really only my own (surely natural) insecurity. This will all work out perfectly, boat high school here we come!